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Robert Shrimsley

Robert Shrimsley

Financial Times

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The new Conservative class war

Badenoch’s attack on an overweening state seeks to imitate Thatcher’s case against the overmighty trade unions

thursday 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The British state is not fit for Starmer’s purpose

Labour ministers find that their newly active government stands on atrophying limbs

26.09.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The new race for political space

Westminster’s duopoly of Labour and Conservatives has never looked more vulnerable

18.09.2024 9

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Labour needs Reeves to be an imperial chancellor

She already has a political empire, but she must command it — and neutralise damage from the government’s early mistakes

11.09.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Conservatives need a leader who can battle irrelevance

The contest to head up the defeated party must establish the Tories as the only serious opposition

04.09.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Why Starmer can’t escape the politics of performance

The lack of a world-class communicator poses real risks for Labour

28.08.2024 40

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Starmer’s trade union summer of love will soon sour

Public service reforms to both rail and health are coming swiftly down the track

21.08.2024 8

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

UK needs no lessons from apologists for rioters

The historic mission of mainstream politics is to listen to the real communities, not their malign mouthpieces

14.08.2024 5

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Rachel Reeves and the limits of clever politics

The chancellor’s scrapping of social care plans shows how short-term tactics continue to let down the UK

31.07.2024 5

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

When five go mad on the motorways

Stiff sentences for climate activists underscore the crucial distinction between protest and disruption

24.07.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Keir Starmer’s never-ending insurgency

Those around the prime minister want to wage a permanent campaign for change that voters will give them credit for

18.07.2024 30

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The very resistible rise of Nigel Farage

Reform UK poses a real threat on the radical right but an improving economy and sense of hope is the best defence

10.07.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The fight for the UK right has begun

Conservatives need to understand why they lost this election

05.07.2024 5

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Why Starmer should now play prosecutor on Brexit

A proper audit of the impact of leaving the EU would deliver political and economic benefits to incoming Labour ministers

03.07.2024 7

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Two years to ‘skelp’ Scottish nationalism

The SNP is down but not out: Labour must prove that a UK government can deliver benefits to Scotland’s voters

26.06.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

No Keir, the real opposition is behind you

Forget the Conservatives, it is his backbench MPs who will put pressure on Starmer

19.06.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Starmer will be centrism’s last chance

UK mainstream parties will not fend off the populist right unless Labour moves fast and builds things

12.06.2024 6

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Behold the final casualties of Brexit

The referendum uncorked an insatiable populist politics that Tories hoped to co-opt. Instead, it has consumed them

05.06.2024 20

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Rishi Sunak’s spaghetti strategy

History shows it doesn’t much matter whether a bold new policy idea is popular if the people proposing it are not

29.05.2024 70

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

A last gamble for a prime minister who has run out of road

With nothing on the horizon likely to dramatically improve, Sunak has decided to seize the economic moment

22.05.2024 40

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The real face of the Deep State

From the infected blood scandal to the Post Office saga, the dead hand of officialdom is everywhere in the UK

22.05.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The Tory right has one last job for Rishi Sunak

Having given up on removing the prime minister, their mission now is to make him the fall guy

08.05.2024 20

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The second coming of Ed Miliband

Labour’s shadow energy secretary could be among the most powerful — and radical — of Starmer’s close allies

01.05.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Political gravity catches up with the SNP

Humza Yousaf played a bad hand dreadfully but a reckoning for the party was unavoidable

29.04.2024 8

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Tories need to learn to love London again

The capital votes for its mayor next week, but the Conservatives’ dissociation from the city means they seem set for failure

24.04.2024 50

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The ECHR needs saving from itself

Rulings on climate and migration offer Europe’s populists a rallying cry against the court’s legitimacy

17.04.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Labour has a great plan for winning — but for governing?

While Keir Starmer’s cautious strategy may reassure voters, the party needs a programme for what it will do in power

10.04.2024 20

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

‘Don’t knows’ will not save the Conservatives

But they could help turn a potential electoral catastrophe into a normal-sized defeat

03.04.2024 30

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The frightening chill on free speech

In the tussle between good intentions and bad actors, society is in danger of losing sight of what it most needs to protect

27.03.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Football-focused Tories have left Labour an open goal

State intervention in everything from childcare to small-town soccer clubs will help the opposition argue for even more

20.03.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

How Labour would roll back the frontiers of Brexit

Keir Starmer is looking for ways to rebuild relations with the EU step by cautious step

13.03.2024 30

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

A payday loan of a Budget

Tax cuts now put off the reality of how to pay for them later — for both Jeremy Hunt and the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves

06.03.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Sunak risks more than defeat by not policing the Tories’ paranoid frontier

Conservatives must confront the inflammatory rhetoric of the right and resist the gravitational pull to the extremes

28.02.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Parliament finds itself in a dangerous position after the Speaker’s intervention

MPs are asking whether Lindsay Hoyle’s procedural manoeuvre has made them more or less safe

22.02.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The Conservatives have been unwitting handmaidens to statism

The UK has experienced the steady and stealthy erosion of individual freedoms

14.02.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Mandates are overrated — Keir Starmer just needs the win

Labour doesn’t need detailed pledges because if the party is voted in it will have scope for change

07.02.2024 9

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Rishi Sunak’s ‘Italian Job’ moment

Wobbles damage the prime minister but Tory critics have no solutions — and are implicated in the years of chaos

31.01.2024 20

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

SNP’s new strategy exposes nationalists’ desperation

Humza Yousaf cannot offer a convincing route to the independence his party demands

24.01.2024 30

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Politics is failing Britain’s universities

Both parties are in denial about the importance and the scale of the financial crisis in higher education

17.01.2024 20

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Why Starmer will not tread lightly on voters’ lives

Labour’s traditions of government activism are strong and the public will expect improvements in hollowed-out state services

10.01.2024 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The clearest sign of a party pressing self-destruct

If the Conservatives won’t stand up for their record, they invite UK voters to agree that they deserve a long spell in opposition

20.12.2023 9

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

Sunak’s Rwanda fight is really a battle for control of the Conservatives

The Brexit ultras resent the realism that the prime minister has sprinkled into government

13.12.2023 20

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

The Conservatives cannot get off the immigration hook

MPs’ fear of Reform UK, and the scale of the numbers, have led to tougher measures without political relief

06.12.2023 10

Financial Times

Robert Shrimsley

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